Gay Adoptions and the Catholic Church

Here’s an interesting article in The Tablet on a Catholic adoption agency sailing between Scylla and Charybdis. On the one hand, Catholic adoption agencies have seen that sometimes it’s in the best interest of a child to place him or her with a gay couple and have quietly been doing so for some time now. On the other hand, the Vatican has reasserted that the ideal is for a child to be placed with a man and woman in a traditional marriage, and that gay partnerships are so far from that ideal that Catholics (and, a fortiori, Catholic agencies) ought to oppose gay adoption. Adding to the dilemma is the insistence of certain governments that an agency either does not discriminate regarding sexual orientation, or gets out of the adoption business altogether.

The Boston Archdiocese’s pullout has gotten the most notice. But the Archdiocese of San Francisco makes for an interesting contrast. There, the letter of the law is being followed, with the Archdiocese no longer placing any children for adoption since it can no longer place with homosexual couples, but the Church is nevertheless “loaning” employees to do basically the same work with another non-profit group that does occasionally place children with gays and lesbians.

It seems logical to me that children would do best in a loving, Catholic family with a Mom and Dad and other siblings. But sometimes that sort of family is not available for a particular child, particularly if the child has special needs. Surely it’s better to place a kid with a loving, responsible same-sex couple than to let him be tossed around from foster home to foster home until he turns 18.

Certainly, what matters most is the welfare of the child, and not the wishes of the would-be parents. But there are no data to support the notion that kids of gay couples turn out any better or worse than kids of straight couples, all else being equal. So, even if one agrees with the Vatican that the best thing would be to place the kids with a man and wife, sometimes the best available option is to place them with homosexuals. Really, if I were a Catholic adoption agent, I would be more worried about the religion of the prospective parents than about their sexual orientation.